can govern.”96
By the 1960s, it was evident to observers from the Right and Left that the Soviet Union had recovered from the practice of mass terror, was unlikely to return to it, and was slowly evolving into a modern, articulated urban society sharing many features with other developed countries. In the years when modernization theory, and its kissing cousin, convergence theory, held sway, the overall impression was that the Soviet Union could become a much more benign society and tolerable enemy than had been proposed by the totalitarian theorists.97 Later conservative critics would read this rejection of exceptionalism as a failure to emphasize adequately the stark differences between the West and the Soviet Bloc, and to suggest a “moral equivalence” between them. Deploying the anodyne language of social science, modernization theory seemed to some to apologize for the worst excesses of Soviet socialism and excuse the violence and forceful use of state power as a necessary externality of development. Social disorder, violence, even genocide could be explained as part of the modernization process. If Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was acceptable as a modernizer, why not Lenin or Stalin?98
Alternatives
Even though government and many scholars were deeply invested in an unmodulated condemnation of all Soviet policies and practices from the late 1940s through much of the 1960s, no single discourse ever dominated Russian/Soviet studies. A number of influential scholars—E. H. Carr (1892–1982), Isaac Deutscher (1907–1967), Theodore von Laue (1916–2000), Alec Nove (1915–1994), Moshe Lewin (1921–2010), Alexander Dallin (1924–2000), and Robert C. Tucker (1918–2010)—offered alternative pictures of the varieties of Bolshevism and possible trajectories. Edward Hallett Carr was a British diplomat, a journalist, a distinguished realist theorist of international relations, an advocate of appeasement in the 1930s, a philosopher of history, and the prolific author of a multi-volume history of the Soviet Union, 1917–29.99 Even in the 1930s, when Carr had been sympathetic to the Soviet project, what he called “the Religion of the Kilowatt and the Machine,” he was critical of Western Communists and “fellow travelers,” like the British Marxist economist Maurice Dobb (1900–1976) and the Fabian socialists Beatrice and Sidney Webb, who ignored the “darker sides of the Soviet regime” and defended them “by transparent sophistry.”100 During World War II, at the moment when the Soviet army and popular endurance halted the Nazi advance, Carr “revived [his] initial faith in the Russian revolution as a great achievement and a historical turning-point.” “Looking back on the 1930s,” he later wrote, “I came to feel that my preoccupation with the purges and brutalities of Stalinism had distorted my perspective. The black spots were real enough, but looking exclusively at them destroyed one’s vision of what was really happening.”101 For more than thirty years, Carr worked on his Soviet history as a story of a desperate and valiant attempt to go beyond bourgeois capitalism in a country where capitalism was weak, democracy absent, and the standard of living abysmally low. Politically, Carr was committed to democratic socialism, to a greater equality than was found in most capitalist societies. He believed in public control and planning of the economic process, and a stronger state exercising remedial and constructive functions.102 Shortly before his death, he glumly remarked to his collaborator Tamara Deutscher: “The left is foolish and the right is vicious.”103
His volume on the Bolshevik revolution appeared in 1950 and challenged the dominant émigré historiography on the October revolution as a sinister coup d’état. Carr stood between the Mensheviks, who thought that bourgeois democracy could have been built in Russia, and the Bolsheviks, who took the risk of seizing power in a country ill-prepared for “a direct transition from the most backward to the most advanced forms of political and economic organization … without the long experience and training which bourgeois democracy, with all its faults, had afforded in the west.”104 Turning later to the 1920s, Carr eschewed a struggle-for-power tale for a narrative that placed the feuding Bolsheviks within the larger economic and social setting. He tied Stalin’s victories over Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Bukharin to his ability to sense and manipulate opportunities that arose from the play of social forces. Still later, Carr argued that collectivization was unavoidable, given Russia’s limited resources for industrialization, and on this issue he differed from his collaborator, R. W. Davies (b. 1925), who had become convinced that industrialization at a modest pace had been possible within the framework of the New Economic Policy.105 Carr’s work was criticized for its sense of inevitability that tended to justify what happened as necessary and to avoid alternative possibilities.106 Yet in its extraordinary breadth and depth (a study of twelve momentous years in fourteen volumes), Carr’s history combined a sensitivity to political contingency, as in his analysis of Stalin’s rise, and an attention to personality and character, as in his different assessments of Lenin and Stalin, with attention to structural determinations, like the ever-present constraints of Russian backwardness.
Carr’s friend, Isaac Deutscher, was a life-long rebel: a Jew who broke with religious orthodoxy and wrote poetry in Polish; a bourgeois who joined the outlawed Communist Party of Poland; a Communist who in 1932 was expelled from the party for his anti-Stalinist opposition; a Trotskyist who remained independent and critical of the movement; and finally a historian who produced some of the most important works on Soviet history in his day, but was shunned by academia.107 In exile in England, both from his native Poland and the Communist milieu in which he had matured, Deutscher turned first to journalism and then to a biography of Stalin, which appeared in 1949.108 A “study [of] the politics rather than the private affairs of Stalin,” this monumental work by “an unrepentant Marxist” challenged the liberal and conservative orthodoxies of the Cold War years and sought to rescue socialism from its popular conflation into Stalinism.109 Deutscher laid out a law of revolution in which “each great revolution begins with a phenomenal outburst of popular energy, impatience, anger, and hope. Each ends in the weariness, exhaustion, and disillusionment of the revolutionary people … The leaders are unable to keep their early promises … [The revolutionary government] now forfeits at least one of its honourable attributes—it ceases to be government by the people.”110 As in Trotsky’s treatment, so in Deutscher’s: Stalin had been hooked by history. He became “both the leader and the exploiter of a tragic, self-contradictory but creative revolution.”111
A year later, Deutscher reviewed a powerful collection of memoirs by six prominent former Communists, the widely-read The God That Failed, edited by the British socialist Richard Crossman. At that time, a parade of former Communists—among them André Malraux, Ruth Fischer, and Whittaker Chambers—had become public eyewitnesses of the nature of the movement and the USSR, all the more credible and authentic in the eyes of the public by virtue of their experience inside and break with the Party. Within a few years, those who stayed loyal to Communist parties would be regarded by much of the public, particularly in the United States, as spies for the Soviet Union. Deutscher was pained, not so much by the apostasies of the ex-Communists, as by their embrace of capitalism. While he saw the ex-Communist as an “inverted Stalinist,” who “ceases to oppose capitalism” but “continues to see the world in black and white, [though] now the colours are differently distributed,” Deutscher believed that the god was not bound to fail.112 Himself a passionate opponent of Stalinism, Deutscher sought to distance what the Soviet Union had become from what the Bolsheviks had originally intended and from the possibility of a different socialism. His idealism and utopian aspiration distinguished him from Carr’s pragmatism and realism. His three-volume biography of Trotsky at once celebrated the intellectual and revolutionary, and soberly revealed his faults and frailties.113 Summing up his interpretation of the failure of socialism in the Soviet Union, he wrote: “In the whole experience of modern man there had been nothing as sublime and as repulsive as the first Workers’ State and the first essay in ‘building socialism.’”114 “There can be no greater tragedy than that of a great revolution’s succumbing to the mailed fist that was to defend it from its enemies. There can be no spectacle as disgusting as that of a post-revolutionary tyranny dressed up in the banners of liberty.”115
In the small world of British
